Aurora Levins Morales
  • Home
    • What's New
  • What I Do
    • Projects >
      • Finca La Lluvia
    • Podcast
    • Writing >
      • Books >
        • Getting Home Alive
        • Kindling
        • Cosecha & Other Stories
      • Essays >
        • Nadie la tiene: Land Ecology and Nationalism
        • Muna Lee
        • Testimonio de una colaboración
      • Writing Sample >
        • Invocation
        • chicken house goat girls
        • First Snow
        • A Remedy for Heartburn
        • Transfusion
        • Maguey/Lost Bird
        • Pines
    • Portfolio >
      • Letters from Earth
      • Rimonim Liturgy Project
  • What We Can Do Together
    • Workshops
    • Public Speaking >
      • Publicity Packet
    • One on One
    • Itinerary
  • Residency in Puerto Rico
  • Connections
    • Join My Mailing List
    • Write to me
    • Permissions
    • Calendar
    • Moon Phase
  • Blog
  • Support Aurora
    • Creatng Access >
      • Hosting Aurora
    • Access Researcher Position
    • Testimonials
  • Puerto Rico Liberation
    • Declaracion
    • Boricuando
Picture

Tectonics

9/22/2011

1 Comment

 
Picture
Waiting to be seen by a doctor.
When the great plates of the earth's crust shift, it seems to happen in a second.  Cups rattle, floors buckle, walls crack, waters move out and then in, alarms go off, the landscape is changed.  But those plates are always in slow, perpetual motion, grinding against, under, over each other, catching, building tension, and then jolting loose.  

It all began when my father drove to Ithaca to see an old friend.  On the way back, in Troy, New York, on the hottest day of the year, his car stalled at an intersection. Friendly people helped him. A woman guided him to the shade of a tree, called AAA, directed traffic around his stalled Volvo, and stayed with him for two hours.  A man brought them iced coffee.  When the tow truck came, he got up from the ground where he'd been sitting, and his legs buckled under him.  He fell against the tree trunk, gashed his head, bruised his ribs and scraped his arms.  A week later he started having sharp pains in the upper right side of his abdomen.  Two days after that he was in the hospital.  A gallstone, possibly knocked out of place by the fall, had blocked a bile duct, and his gallbladder had gone septic.  Hallucinating, confused, in pain, he was unable to follow what the doctors were telling him.  Normally they would have taken his gallbladder out, but he has a heart condition, and they didn't dare risk general anesthesia while he was so sick.  Alternatives were being discussed, and we weren't fully in the loop.  I got on a plane.

For the next two weeks I spent many long days at Mt. Auburn Hospital, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, looking out from the sixth floor windows over a summer sea of trees, sometimes sunlit, sometimes lashed with rain, listening to the endless beeping and buzzing of hospital machinery, getting to know the nurses and their shifts, their countries of origin, their moods; waiting for the doctors to talk to us, reconciling conflicting stories and theories and interpretations of tests, enduring repetitive questions, making sure nothing was done without our consent, explaining to my father, updating family and friends on several continents, riding the constant changes in his condition.  Once we brought him home, and then another stone blocked another duct and we had to take him back.  They put a tube into his gallbladder to drain bile, another through his nose into his stomach to suck out an air bubble, and a probe with a camera and a little claw down his throat into his gut, to catch and remove the second gallstone and widen the duct.  He was full of bruises from the blood thinner they gave him to prevent lung clots. Short, intense crises and long stretches of boredom and worry.  Between bursts of medical activity my father told me histories of the left, and the politics of genetics, but couldn't keep track of what day it was, what they'd said he could eat.  As I sat by his bed, feeling the texture of his bewilderment, I realized that though the sepsis was making him see things, this earth had been moving for months.
Picture
Papi coming home, early 1960s.
My mother and father were together for 62 years, from the summer of 1949 until she died in March of this year, and besides being his best friend, companion, intellectual and political comrade, and beloved, she was also the strong-minded administrator of their joint lives.  I saw that he was overwhelmed by the new requirements of his self care (testing sugar, taking insulin, varieties and schedules of medications) and the new requirements of the single life (home maintenance my mother kept track of, buying clothing my mother would have ordered for him, noticing emotions my mother would have noticed and probed.)  Slowly it dawned on me that at least for now, he shouldn't be living alone, and then, that I was the only one of his children who was able to move in with him. After thirty-five years in the San Francisco Bay Area, the ground has moved under my feet.

My mother's room, the "master" bedroom, is like a studio apartment, with areas for sleeping and desk work, and a wide loft with shelves for books.  With the help of my chosen sister, Freda, and now my brother Ricardo, I am stripping it of the aura of sickness, the residue of her dying.  When it is cleared and cleansed, it will become my home for the next year.  My job is not to nurse my father or keep house for him.  I'm unable to do those things for myself, let alone someone else.  Other people will help him regain his strength by climbing up and down the stairs.  Others will make his bed, wash his dishes, cook most of his meals.  He has a wonderful new doctor with a holistic eye who makes house calls.  My brother Alejandro handles his finances.  I have a different task.

Picture
In 1981 my father had a massive heart attack that almost killed him.  Afterwards my mother wrote a poem describing herself and my father as two trees grown so close over the years that she couldn't tell where he left off and she began, bound together, root, bark and limb.

Like any plant whose boughs have been struck by lightening or wrenched by wind, half its mass torn away, my father is simultaneously fine and in shock.  My job is to help him make the passage from the living half of a stricken ecosystem, struggling for equilibrium, to a balanced, rooted, state of singleness.  The Spanish poet Antonio Machado wrote, caminante no hay camino, se hace camino al andar. There is no road.  You make it by walking. I don't have a road map for this journey.  Not even a topo map.  But I know how to accompany, how to ask questions, how to face unthinkable change.  I'm still a citizen of the cities by the bay, still anchored to the edge of that great ocean and the eucalyptus scented air, fingers still intertwined with those of beloved friends at the Western edge of the North American plate, but for now I'm going to be living with deciduous leaves that will soon begin to fall, exploring the possibilities inherent in a landscape turned upside down. 

1 Comment
pram link
3/4/2013 10:44:21 pm

So much so that you made me want to learn more about it. Your blog is my stepping stone, my friend. Thanks for the heads up on this subject.

Reply

Your comment will be posted after it is approved.


Leave a Reply.

    About Aurora

    Aurora Levins Morales is a disabled and chronically ill, community supported  writer, historian, artist and activist. It takes a village to keep her blogs coming.  To become part of the village it takes, donate here.

    Picture
    Never miss a post!
    Click below to add this blog to your favorite RSS reader:

    RSS Feed

    Follow Me on Pinterest
    Picture

    Archives

    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    March 2017
    November 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    May 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    June 2015
    April 2015
    February 2015
    November 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    March 2014
    October 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    May 2013
    April 2013
    March 2013
    December 2012
    August 2012
    July 2012
    April 2012
    March 2012
    February 2012
    January 2012
    November 2011
    October 2011
    September 2011
    July 2011
    June 2011
    May 2011
    March 2011
    February 2011
    January 2011
    April 2010

    Categories

    All
    Alba
    Art
    Artwork
    Cuba
    Ecology
    Epilepsy
    Family
    Freedom Of Speech
    Genetics
    Healing
    Healing Justice
    Health
    History
    Jews
    La Casita
    Language
    Latin@s
    Love
    Middle East
    Pesticides
    Poetry
    Puerto Rico
    Racism
    Rape
    Repression
    Sexuality
    Trauma
    Travel
    Weapons

Listen to my podcasts .     Support my work.   Tell me what you think.  
  • Home
    • What's New
  • What I Do
    • Projects >
      • Finca La Lluvia
    • Podcast
    • Writing >
      • Books >
        • Getting Home Alive
        • Kindling
        • Cosecha & Other Stories
      • Essays >
        • Nadie la tiene: Land Ecology and Nationalism
        • Muna Lee
        • Testimonio de una colaboración
      • Writing Sample >
        • Invocation
        • chicken house goat girls
        • First Snow
        • A Remedy for Heartburn
        • Transfusion
        • Maguey/Lost Bird
        • Pines
    • Portfolio >
      • Letters from Earth
      • Rimonim Liturgy Project
  • What We Can Do Together
    • Workshops
    • Public Speaking >
      • Publicity Packet
    • One on One
    • Itinerary
  • Residency in Puerto Rico
  • Connections
    • Join My Mailing List
    • Write to me
    • Permissions
    • Calendar
    • Moon Phase
  • Blog
  • Support Aurora
    • Creatng Access >
      • Hosting Aurora
    • Access Researcher Position
    • Testimonials
  • Puerto Rico Liberation
    • Declaracion
    • Boricuando